Tue, 14 Dec 2004

This story has been floating around for a few days now, but I've
hesitated to write about it because it sounds potentially fishy
and I was hoping some of the questions would get answered.

In a nutshell: Florida programmer Clint Curtis has filed documents
with the FBI claiming that while he was working for Yang Enterprises,
Tom Feeny (then a FL state representative and lobbyist for Yang,
now a US Congressman) asked him to develop prototype software
in order to rig the vote in Florida. (story
in Wired) (story on Blue
Lemur)

All rather suspicious, but there are lots of questionable aspects
to the story.
Why did Curtis wait so long to come clean? He claims that he
assumed any such software would be easily detectable through source
code inspection, and it was only after recently reading that voting
software was proprietary that he had the shocking realization that
perhaps there wasn't much source code review going on. It's hard
to believe that a programmer who had worked on such a project would
have been able to miss this point for so long.

Curtis has apparently also been to the FBI complaining about Yang's
ethics before, on an unrelated charge. Details are skimpy about
what that charge was, or what the resolution was, but until those
details are available, one has to be slightly skeptical.

On Curtis' side, the fact that Yang nor Sweeney are willing to
comment on the story suggests that there may be some truth to it.
If his past allegations against Yang, or other aspects of the case,
cast doubt on his claims, wouldn't they be pointing to that?

That the FBI is unwilling to comment is not surprising:
investigation is ongoing, and I wouldn't expect any comment from
investigators at this point.

It seems unlikely that Curtis' actual code was used, in any case.
He had no access to
the voting machine software, and simply wrote some scripts in Visual
Basic as a proof of concept. But we'll likely never know for sure,
since the public hasn't had access to the voting machines for quite
some time and it would be quite easy for any such evidence to have
been long since wiped from memory. (Though perhaps forensic
analysis of the disks might reveal something?)

Still, it's an interesting story, and it'll be fun to see how it
resolves.